Does the Thought of Following-the-Leader Make You Feel Ill?

Congrats, you have developed the proper, future-oriented, autonomous and fully-decentralized mindset.

A recent NYTimes article The Rise and (Maybe) Fall of Influencers got me thinking about these digital age chieftans and empresses. We have a few of our own now on STEEMIT - are they followed because they are very very good bloggers, or are they followed because they are followed, and people are simply going where the curation cheddar is, or to give their two-pom-pom support to these new-phatties in hopes they will recieve phat upvotes?

So what of so-called "Influencers", people who have developed online followings by packaging their cool lifestyle or vibrant and interesting personality and ideas, and used their new found fans to sell them all kinds of shitty products, or to hype other personalities, events, handbags, perfume, undies, cars, tampons.. youuuuu name it!

Kids following other kids on Instagram, religiously, simply because they are rich .. spoiled rotten and EXTREMELY WASTEFUL .. going so far as to spend their days battling the fans of competing rich kids in endless "f*** you!" threads?

I don't know about you, but this kind of thing makes me wretch. It's one thing to agree with what someone believes, or who has given you useful information, and in return you give them support by subscribing, following, liking what have you, it is quite another to put oneself in that person's "camp", and engage in online warfare on their behalf - in a place and time where we can free ourselves from our self-appointed betters, we seem to wish not to fully escape, but instead return to a kind of pathetic feudalistic serfdom.

STEEM Growth & Influencers

I entirely understand why we should seek out these new age warlords, and bring the to STEEM/STEEMIT, so that they can drag their cults in behind them, but I only hope that this will become unnecessary .. I hope that individuals find us, and discover the value and the potential for themselves, so that it can be their personal find .. and in that way, feel far more a special thing, which is how I came to be here.

While we want this special place to blow up and grow at an uncontrollable rate, it would be nice if we did not have to bring the old world ways of gathering ourselves - we are here as individuals, bonding and sharing with other individuals, not a collection of cliques trying to get ahead of other groups of this or that.